Gays unwanted in Young Adult Books?

When you think of the young adult books capturing the attention of America's adolescents and pre-teens, predominately-white, predominately-straight novels like the Twilight and Hunger Games series come to mind. In a post on Publishers Weekly's website, two writers argue that the reason most YA books don't include LGBT characters, especially ones of color, is because book agents don't have the balls to sell manuscripts with them.

Rachel Manija Brown, author of the memoir All the Fishes Come Home to Roost: An American Misfit in India, and Sherwood Smith, writer of the YA novel Crown Duel, say that fear is running the YA book industry. Brown and Smith wrote an unpublished novel together called Stranger, featuring a young Asian gay male character with a boyfriend.

"An agent from a major agency, one which represents a bestselling YA novel in the same genre as ours, called us," Brown and Smith write. "The agent offered to sign us on the condition that we make the gay character straight, or else remove his viewpoint and all references to his sexual orientation."

Full report here Advocate

Pitching for queer lit

Shobna Kumar, the brains behind India’s first queer literature portal Queer Ink, encourages the possibility of more literature being available for the community

When she landed in India — after having lived in the queer capitals of the world such as Sydney and San Francisco — Shobna Kumar felt that access to literature on and by the gay community was limited. She felt that her community was grossly under-represented in mainstream literature. And that is how India’s first queer book portal came to be. Here she talks about the 15 months of Queer Ink, the desire for the gay community to be acknowledged for their literary work and more.

How did Queer Ink come about?
When I first came to India eight years ago to be with my partner, I found that there were hardly any books that related to the gay community. What was available online would invariably be unavailable as Indian shipping laws don’t really make provision for such books. Alternatively some sites that do source books from abroad have a really long delivery period. My interactions with members of the community also brought out that gay literature was largely unavailable and what is found cannot be had on a single platform. Also there is an embarrassment of sorts to purchase such books in mainstream bookstores. And so a year of research later, Queer Ink was born.

You also provide a platform for queer publication — do you think Queer Ink has helped more gay people express themselves?  
We have a segment on the site titled Writers Corner. This is an open invitation to people to pen their thoughts on a singular platform. What surprisingly happened is that many people began to send their work to me privately with expressions of interest in getting them published. This has led us to consider taking up publication of queer literature in the future.

Full report here Bangalore Mirror

Homopolitical

Described as an “entertaining love story” on its back cover, Hostel Room 131 opens in Belgaum, Karnataka, with the protagonist, Siddharth, going to the police station to lodge a complaint against his ‘in-laws’ for hiding his beloved, Su, from him. Su, as we learn, is Sudhir, an engineering student at a college in Pune, with whom Siddharth is having a torrid, and of course clandestine, affair. Their cover is finally blown by Ravi Humbe, recalling Chatur Ramalingam in 3 Idiots, a Belgaum boy and Su’s hostel-mate. Siddharth is threatened by Su’s menacing uncles — the “carnivores” — and forced to return to Bombay, abject and lovelorn, shedding copious tears like a typical Bollywood hero jilted in romance.

The first section of the book is perhaps the most promising, as R. Raj Rao distinctly captures the seediness, undercurrent of hostility and obsession with honour in provincial India. The coexistence of puritanism about heterosexual relations with an unsuspecting tolerance of homoerotic friendships is a disconcerting feature of repressed societies. But the consequences tend to be deadly if such male intimacies turn actually sexual. So, while enlightening the unsophisticated small-towner Sudhir, the educated urbanite Siddharth keeps recasting Bollywood classics like Zanzeer, Sholay and Kala Patthar as essentially gay narratives cloaked in the garb of machismo. Amitabh Bachchan, who seems to have an unexpected hold over the gay imagination, is perceived as being actually ‘interested’ in the men around him — Pran, Dharmendra and Shashi Kapoor — rather than in Rekha or Jaya Bhadhuri. The singular lack of irony, or of humour, in such solemn pronouncements takes the edge out of Siddharth’s subversive homosexual (mis)readings, and makes him sound like a rather insipid “homopolitical” man.

Full review here Telegraph

Not just straight talk

Shobhna S. Kumar was already a well-travelled social entrepreneur—born in Fiji, raised in Sydney, Australia; worked a bit in the US—when she moved to India eight years ago.

It was when she broke her ankle two years ago and could not literally travel anywhere that she decided to become a businesswoman as well.

After 20 years in the development sector, during which she worked with a multiple strata of people, she wanted her life of “transitions” to make one more—with Queer Ink.

She says about her partner, who does not wish to be identified: “We have been together eight years, we both had lives prior to this. We used our retirement funds to start Queer Ink because we believe in it.”

Full report here Mint

Coming out of the closet, the write way

Reading has been a true companion and besides other things I enjoy reading works that explore the many facets of homosexuality. I read Quarantine by Rahul Mehta recently. The book is a collection of gay theme stories. The author has accumulated some interesting short stories of Indian-American gay men who shed their pretensions and allow their sexuality to come out of the closet.

These are real life issues, yet they take a candid course.

And, of course, there is Armistead Maupin’s work, Tales of the City that was first published as a series in the San Francisco Chronicle. Call it a classic or the most widely read work on the subject, it is one-of-a-kind.

Published as a series of seven novels between 1978 to 2007, the books present a slice of San Francisco, and they also stands witness to the life and times of the gay community during that period. Realistic to the core, Armistead’s thoughts ride high on humour. They remain an amazing and completely engrossing peace of work. What sets a veteran Armistead or the new kid on the block, Rahul, stand out, is their handling of the issue in focus. No heavy duty stuff here, they convey their message in the most effortless manner. Yet the impact of the message doesn’t lose steam in their casual approach.

Full report here Deccan Chronicle

Archie Comics' gay character debuts

Considered every teen's bible, Archie Comics has a new twist in its cast. And no it's not another bombshell to give Veronica competition, neither is it a cool dude to make Archie nervous. The new character is Kevin Keller - a gay teen!

Embracing the changing attitudes towards homosexuality, the comic has taken a bold and positive step by introducing a gay character Kevin Keller, who will become a permanent member of Archie's gang.

Talking about the inspiration for the idea, Jon Goldwater, the co-chief executive of Archie Comic Publications revealed to Daily Beast, "We're batting story ideas around and Dan (artist) says, 'What if Veronica, who's able to get everything she wants, isn't able to get something? What if a new good-looking boy comes into town and Veronica wants to date him and he turns her down?'" Goldwater recalls in an interview. "And I say, 'Why would he do that?' And Dan says, 'Because he's gay.' And I say, 'Now that's funny. That's a good premise.' "

Full report here Hindustan Times 

Yaraana: A bittersweet symphony

It is indeed orchestrated that I succeeded my first brush (R. Raj Rao’s Hostel Room 131 with queer literature, with another: Yaraana, Gay Writing from South Asia, edited by Hoshang Merchant.

A novel exploration of gay sexual identity and men lovestruck by men, Yaraana makes for interesting reading. Only after I put this anthology down, do I discover that Yaraana was first published in 1999. In this extended version, the novel emphasises the timelessness of its collection. Queer themed (and often, not necessarily) pieces in English and translated from Gujarati, and Urdu and Marathi.

Yaraana begins on a comprehensive note, in an introduction by editor Hoshang Merchant. Merchant traces contemporary and past societal notions of everything queer, leaving you to marvel at the expanse of the genre's literature.

Full report here IBNLive

The secrets of a boys’ hostel

Author, academic R Raj Rao needs no introduction. He was associated with India’s first gay film (Riyad Vinci Wadia’s BomGay in 1996) and published the country’s first gay novel (The Boyfriend, 2003). He is also a poet and was part of India’s gay rights movement much before the country was comfortable discussing alternative sexual identities.

As his new novel Hostel Room 131 (published by Penguin) hits bookstores across the country, the author talks about gay writing in India.

Hostel Room 131 is being marketed as a gay novel. This is the politics of minority writing, where the issue is foregrounded. How do you negotiate the issue, and more importantly, what’s the novel is about?

I guess what you mean is that the ‘issue’ is foregrounded, as opposed to the art. This is a view that I have been resisting for years. My training is in literature. Form is much more important to me than content. Anyone who has taken the trouble to go through my entire body of work, will see for himself how much experimentation there is. That my book is a gay love story is only incidental.

Full report here New Indian Express

India now has seven magazines on gay issues

After a far-reaching judgment on homosexuality last year, India's publishing world is abuzz with as many as seven magazines on issues of interest and concern to the gay community, with topics ranging from glamour to safe sex.

Some of these magazines may be in the form of e-zines, but their popularity - going by the number of downloads each of them claims - is making their publishers also look at the possibility of print editions in the near future.

All, nevertheless, say it is thanks to the Delhi High Court judgement July 2 last year, which decriminalised gay sex among two consenting adults and not only raised awareness about this community but also helped them speak about themselves.

'This shows a growing confidence and optimism in the Indian queer community and the need for expression of the younger generation,' says Ranjit Monga, 46, a media consultant and documentary filmmaker, commenting on the rise in the number of queer magazines.

The newest entrant in the magazine space dealing with gay rights and issues is Manvendra Singh Gohil, the erstwhile prince of Rajpipla in Gujarat and a self-confessed queer, who has launched a publication called Fun.

'There was a need to highlight the issues faced by the community, which the mainstream media did not address adequately. I also wanted to connect more with my community. Then I thought this medium would be the best to reach out,' Gohil told IANS.

Full report here Sify

Queer reads

A year after homosexuality was decriminalised, Shobhna Kumar has founded India’s first online LGBT bookshop.
It’s about mainstreaming,” says Shobhna Kumar, explaining why she co-founded Queer Ink, India’s first online LGBT bookshop (www.queer-ink.com). LGBT stands for “lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender”, and that is more or less the core demographic that celebrated, this month, the first anniversary of the decriminalisation of gay sex in India. On July 2 last year, the Delhi High Court decided the 150-year-old Section 377 violated fundamental human rights; so the law has at last ceased to apply to things that consenting adults do in private.

Now that people of alternate sexuality are no longer automatically criminals, another struggle remains: for acceptance and ‘mainstreaming’. Indeed, ‘queer’, although it is a less specific term than LGBT, avoids the context of sex. “Queer is not sexuality only; it is anything that is non-mainstream,” Shobhna Kumar explains, adding that “As a queer person, I live in the mainstream.” She lives, and Queer Ink is based in the middle-class seaside suburb of Malad in Mumbai.

You might wonder how mainstreaming is served if you’re setting up a queer-specific business and community. Kumar describes how she came to think of books as her route to normalisation. It started with a lacuna. “I’m a bookworm,” she says, “and when I came to live in Mumbai some years ago I looked and searched high and low for non-mainstream books. The fiction that interests me is not your average murder mystery or something. I like lifestyle books, non-fiction, anthologies. I don’t want to read about rich businessmen.” Eventually, she says, “I figured out that people don’t go to retail stores and pick up books like this.” Between the shelf and the cash counter, she says, other browsers and salespeople “look down” on people who choose certain kinds of books.
 
Full report here Business Standard

The ink goes pink

Mumbai entrepreneur starts online bookstore for queer literature

The champagne is on ice and the celebrations are in preparatory mode as the queer community readies to mark the one-year anniversary of Section 377 being struck down by the High Court.

But now, they have one more reason to cheer. They can now buy queer literature online.

 "I think I am in the right place at the right time," says Mumbai-based Shobhna Kumar, founder-director, Queer Ink, an online store and publishing house for queer literature. It's website address is: www.queer-ink.com
"It is such an exciting time to be in India," says Shobhna, who is a lesbian herself.

"I see transformation everywhere and not just in the gay scene. I thought it was an apt time to launch and talk publicly about Queer Ink, which has been up and running for about two months now."

Full report here Mid-day

India’s first gay bookstore opens in Mumbai

India’s first online store selling gay literature has opened. Based in Malad, the store is called www.queer-ink.com and has been started by Fiji-Indian Shobhna Kumar, a self-professed lesbian.

She works within the city’s gay community, counselling people and their families, helping organise the queer rally and working in HIV prevention.

“I had a selfish reason for starting this, as I could not get access to these books,” she explains. “And Amazon would not deliver them. I think they wouldn’t get through customs as they offend Indian sensibilities. There are a few Indian online bookstores, but they take weeks to deliver. I figured other people must be in the same position.”

She started the store herself and has all the stock ready so she can deliver to any metro in two days.

Full report here Hindustan Times


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First homosexual online bookstore for gays in India BollyPatrika.com
The ink goes pink Mid-Day

Rahul Mehta's Quarantine is a slice of gay life

Rahul Mehta’s brassy debut short story collection Quarantine unravels the lives of openly gay Indian-American men — men who are strident in their sexuality, not hiding in pseudo marriages or behind the guise of bisexuality. However, that doesn’t prevent them from being damaged by the various complexities of life — infidelity, heartburn, shady gigolos, past lovers or small-minded relatives.

On his 21st birthday, Rahul came out to his mother about his sexual preference. Now, years later, was this book his way of coming out to the world? “No, I never thought of this book as a coming out (although, in effect, it is kind of functioning that way when it comes to my relatives in India, who, unlike my relatives in America, don’t know that I’m gay),” says US-based Rahul, who is a lecturer in English at Alfred University. “But that’s certainly not why I wrote the stories. Instead, the book came from a desire to tell stories. In the end, I hope that the stories speak.”

With the camp classic Dostana and the recent Supreme Court ruling, does he see the emergence of a stronger gay-themed genre in Indian pop culture? “I hope so. And I hope that we continue to see more and more realistic representations of LGBT characters rather than reductive stereotypes. I think it’s so important in helping us move toward a more tolerant and socially-just society,” he says.

Full report here DNA

‘I've always been a writer'

With his first short story collection, Quarantine, being released recently, Rahul Mehta talks about sexuality, writing and acceptance.

Rahul Mehta's short-story collection Quarantine is about young gay men and their relationships with their families and lovers. Written with unusual tenderness and insight, the book represents a coming out of sorts for Mehta, a U.S.-based lecturer whose relatives in India don't yet know that he is homosexual.

When did you first develop an interest in writing, and specifically creative writing?
I've always been a writer. Even when I was 13 or 14, I was telling people that I was going to be a writer. In ninth grade once, we had to do a research project on a career that we were interested in. When we had to submit our proposals for our projects, I chose “writer”, and my teacher wrote back, “That's not a career. Choose something else.” So I shadowed an advertising executive.

To be fair to my teacher, I don't think she was necessarily trying to discourage me. I think she was just trying to get me to be practical, to save me from a difficult path. Much later, in grad school, one of my professors said a similar thing. She said she always tells her students who want to become writers, “If you can do something else, do it. If you can't: God help you, and welcome.”

Full report here Hindu

Not just gay writing

The week I start making notes for this essay is the same week my mother is reading for the first time the manuscript for my short story collection, Quarantine...,” Rahul Mehta writes in an essay, “Coming Out”, just after the publication of this debut collection.

“What I didn’t say then was that I, in fact, don’t want (my parents) to read it. And now that my mother is, I am terrified. I am worried that she will object to the family stories I have stolen and altered and bent to suit my purposes. I am worried that she won’t understand what ‘fiction’ means, and that every time she reads a passage in which a young, gay Indian-American man is having sex (and there is, in fact, a fair amount of sex in the book), that she will think it is me: me having rough sex in an alley, me masturbating in the back of the family car, me having unprotected sex in a loft in New York with a one-night stand.”

More, almost, than the nine stories in Quarantine, this essay marks the pleasures and pitfalls of Rahul Mehta’s writing. This is one of the most surprising collections I’ve read in recent months: honest, spare, moving in the tenderness with which he chronicles the fault-lines and the epiphanies of relationships, but narrow in its scope and ambitions.

Full report here Business Standard

Archie comics to introduce first gay character

Now it won't be only about Archie, Veronica and Betty. The world’s oldest teenager comic book is to introduce its first openly gay character Kevin Keller, announced the publisher on Friday.

"The introduction of Kevin is just about keeping the world of Archie Comics current and inclusive. Archie's hometown of Riverdale has always been a safe world for everyone. It just makes sense to have an openly gay character in Archie comic books," said Jon Goldwater of Archie Comics on its official blogsite http://www.archiecomics. com/blog/news/

The Veronica #202 edition will introduce Kevin as the new hunk in town and Veronica just has to have him in the full-issue story Isn't it Bromantic?

Full report here Hindustan Times

Geography is history

Two books that reveal the international Indian. One shows how to do it right...

After the exit: Rahul Mehta's Quarantine

Most Indian fiction in English in the last two decades falls under what is disdainfully referred to in literary circles as “mango pickle” writing. These are elaborately written stories of being raised in an archetypal corner of exotic India, of walking through paddy fields, lying awake in the festering summer heat and the haunting memory of grandmother’s cooking. Smack your lips a last time, because mango pickle stories are now on the wane.

Much like our peripatetic countrymen, Indian writing has also gone places. The works of two new authors releasing this month augment this trend. The first is Rahul Mehta’s Quarantine, a book of nine short stories about gay Indian Americans. In Mehta’s world, the big story is not about coming out of the closet; it is what happens after the grand exit. His characters are cast adrift from the original American dream of big money, big house and big car. They inhabit cockroach-ridden apartments with dirty linoleum floors and have complicated relationships with other men. None of his protagonists long for India or an idea of India, they are American, comfortably ensconced in both their nationality and sexuality. Sure, there is anxiety about their family’s acceptance of their homosexuality, but it is societal, not cultural.

The script-turned-book: Manisha Lakhe's The Betelnut Killers

Manisha Lakhe’s The Betelnut Killers begins with detective Franklin D. Wade walking into a sanatorium in Portland, Oregon, US. For the rest, the book shifts to the home of Chimanbhai Shah, a Gujarati who runs an Indian shop. When Supriya, a hottie who was Shah’s assistant, starts her own store on the other side of the mall, Shah feels the “heat” of the competition. The Shah family, determined to get rid of Supriya, hatches a plan to bring Osmanbhai, a Mumbai don, to the US. But of course, things go wrong from the start.

Lakhe lived in Portland and she knows the topography of the place well. Also on cue are some of her observations about Indian Americans. What lets Betelnut Killers down is what comes across as Lakhe’s contempt for Indian Americans such as Shah. She caricatures them to such an extent that it is impossible for the reader to care about the plot.

Full report here Mint

India's answer to Brokeback Mountain ready to hit cinemas

First Indian film to feature a gay kiss, Dunno Y … Na Jaane Kyun, likely to spark controversy...

The posters are ready, so is the film. The only question is whether the Indian public is too. Dunno Y … Na Jaane Kyun, a film featuring India's first cinematic gay kiss, is scheduled to go on general release within weeks. Already dubbed India's answer to Brokeback Mountain it tells the story of an aspiring model who travels to Mumbai, India's commercial and film capital, to seek his fortune and enters into a homosexual relationship, in part to further his career.

Trailers of the film have been well received by activists. "It looks good," said Ashok Row Kavi, editor of Bombay Dost, India's first gay magazine. It talks of the complexities [of being gay] in India. Taboos are still very strong and hopefully it will change things."

For decades Bollywood avoided graphic depictions of even heterosexual kisses, with films famously cutting away to images of budding flowers, breaking waves or crashing waterfalls at the crucial moment. Earlier this year a film called Love, Sex … and Dhokha (ditching) which included relatively graphic scenes of heterosexual sex was released. Though there was much media debate, the film generated little public outrage, encouraging those seeking to draw the largely formulaic Indian film industry in new directions. However the most explicit sequences in the film were cut or altered by censors.

Full report here Guardian

Gay men in grey tales

Rahul Mehta's debut collection of short stories, Quarantine, launches in India this month. In simple, fluid prose, Mehta weaves intimate tales of ‘ordinary' Indian-Americans trying to find meaning in their lives and relationships. Many of his characters are gay men, who appear to have come to terms with their sexuality a long time ago. Thus, ‘gayness' is part of every story's normal landscape. Mehta, the son of Gujarati immigrants from Mumbai, was born and bred in Virginia and teaches English at Alfred University in New York state. He talks storytelling and sexuality with Amit Bhattacharya by email. 

Your stories portray family dynamics among Indian immigrants in the US with great intimacy. How autobiographical are they?
The work is certainly shaped by personal experience (but) I would definitely resist any attempt to characterize it as "autobiographical". The work is definitely fiction, not memoir.

Gay relationships are a common thread in your stories. In some of them, parents are comfortable with their son's homosexuality. Does that accurately reflect attitudes within the Indian-American community?
I'm not sure the Indian-American community as a whole is any more accepting of homosexuality than similar communities in India. In fact, in some ways, Indian communities in America might be even more conservative than in India. There is a perception that many Indian immigrants from the first big wave of immigration in the 1950s and 1960s still cling to an idea of "Indian values" that is essentially 50 years out-of-date. However, I've been very fortunate that all of the people in my life – my parents, my brother, my uncles, aunts, cousins, and my parents' family-friends – have been incredibly supportive, not just of my being gay, but of my being a writer, my choosing a path that may be different from the standard stereotype of the Indian-American doctor or engineer or banker.

Full interview here Times of India

Hyderabad’s Parsi yogi

When the man with a long white Dumbledorish beard, twinkling eyes and soothing voice, surrounded by books, speaks, one is drawn by the humour and the inherent life wisdom in his voice. One of the most important contemporary poets in India, Hoshang Merchant is the first poet to publicly acknowledge himself as a homosexual. Describing himself as a rebel and a gender Dalit, he is comfortable in his own skin both in his poems and in real life. Currently professor of Poetry and Gay Studies at the University of Hyderabad, Merchant has published various collections of poetry and also edited Yaraana: Gay Stories from India. His book Indian Homosexuality was published recently.

When did you start writing poetry?
I was 16 but I was always a literary creature. I was gay but of course I didn’t come out then. I started writing again at 23 because I was beaten up and left for dead on the streets at Purdue. When I was a student, I used to cruise the streets to pick up men. I think the person who beat me up could not have an orgasm. That was his way of having an orgasm. I had to go for therapy and I started writing poetry as a way of coping. I was not writing gay poetry then. My first poem was To Subbalakshmi. I used to write about things which were not really about my life.

Full interview here New Indian Express